Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

A Hungry Explorer in New York's 3 Chinatowns

DEEP fried and braised chicken claw is not my usual breakfast of choice. But I was at the Ocean Palace Pavilion on Avenue U in Brooklyn, and a latte and croissant were not on the menu. As I nibbled at this delicacy, flavored with ginger and soy, I discovered that chicken claw is pretty tasty. Even at 10 a.m.

It was the kind of revelation I would have again and again over the next two days, as I embarked on a journey through the many Chinatowns of New York City. From a culinary point of view, they are among the most fascinating and often mysterious neighborhoods in the city.

Manhattan's Chinatown has been around as far back as the late 19th century, and has recently grown, nudging its way into Little Italy. In the past decade or so, new Chinatowns have sprung up in Brooklyn and Queens. As immigration laws have relaxed and more Asians have moved to New York, these neighborhoods have become increasingly complex, with groups from nearly every region of Asia gaining a presence. Gradually, the neighborhoods have developed their own personalities and specialties, not immediately apparent to the uninitiated.

Manhattan's Chinatown has maintained some of the city's best Cantonese restaurants while making room for less familiar cuisines. Brooklyn's restaurants are almost entirely Cantonese, and Queens is home to a large number of Taiwanese, Korean, Shanghai-style and Chiew Chow restaurants. Each neighborhood offers terrific shopping for the home cook. In Manhattan, the streets are often pulsating with tourists but you'll find great specialty stores; in Brooklyn and Queens, you'll find good prices and the mood is calm enough that you can ask questions. Because they are all actively evolving they continue to surprise, even if you know them well.

Exploration has its virtues, but it was clear I needed a guide, someone who considered these neighborhoods his own. So I called Norman Weinstein, one of the most respected teachers of Chinese cooking in New York. Born in Manhattan, Mr. Weinstein's obsession with Chinese food and culture took hold in 1963, when he was studying for a master's degree in choral music. He finished school, learned to cook Chinese food, and has been teaching it to others ever since.

It was my turn. He agreed to show me around and take me to his favorite pockets, and help me begin building my own shopping and dining map of these communities.

BROOKLYN

The chicken claw wasn't just a warm up, but a test. Mr. Weinstein, a small, earnest man, likes to take the measure of his students' willingness to change the way they look at Chinese food. Had I not tasted the chicken claw, I might have been relegated to the wonton soup class.

Thankfully, I passed. We had a long day ahead. It was the breakfast hour, and the restaurant was full of diners eating dim sum and reading the paper. We had dumplings filled with thick, fleshy Chinese chives, then fried bean curd skin stuffed with shrimp paste made its way onto the table. It was served with Worcestershire sauce.

It was just the kind of contradiction we would see again and again, and part of what makes New York's Chinatowns so difficult to sort out.

''You see the roasted duck on the top?'' Mr. Weinstein asked, pointing to the window display at the front of the restaurant. He continued past roasted pig, chicken roasted with soy sauce, ''white cooked'' chicken, which is steeped in broth, cuttlefish, sausage and spare ribs. ''This is how you know immediately that it's a Hong Kong-style restaurant,'' he said.

Hong Kong and Cantonese restaurants are similar in style, though Hong Kong restaurants tend to be glitzier and have much larger menus. Either might have fish in a tank by the window. The displays are meant to emphasize the freshness of the cuisine. Cantonese cooks steam and stir fry and keep to simple sauces. Shanghai-style restaurants never have live fish in the window. It is an inland cuisine with sweeter, darker, more complex sauces. Taiwanese restaurants serve many different kinds of soups and a colorful array of organ meats.

We weren't in a full-fledged Chinatown, but a ''Chinatownette,'' as Mr. Weinstein calls it, that stretches just nine blocks along Avenue U in Homecrest, from East 12th Street to Ocean Avenue. It is New York's newest Chinatown, emerging much as the others outside Manhattan did. Ed Schoenfeld, a restaurant consultant, said, ''It's from this class of Chinese people making enough money to leave New York and move to what to them is the suburbs.'' The restaurants and shops have sprung up to serve these new communities.

For now, Homecrest is nothing like the city's other bustling Chinatowns. You might even call it sleepy. But we ate and ran. Mr. Weinstein wanted to get to the livelier scene, a few miles away on Eighth Avenue in Sunset Park, where a large Cantonese population has settled. He headed for Hong Kong Supermarket, a chain with locations in Manhattan as well as around the country.

He went straight for a stack of lotus root, a creamy peach vegetable shaped like a gourd that is sliced and used much like a potato. Next to it were fresh green snow pea leaves that looked like they had been plucked off the vine minutes before, water spinach, yellow chives, Chinese chives and flowering chives.

He patted them all, then turned toward another aisle. ''And here, of course,'' he said wryly, ''is your soda section.''

''These cuisines are condiment based,'' Mr. Weinstein said. ''I have a lot of interesting things in my cupboard at home.'' One that has remained unopened is Har Har Tickled Vegetables.

The very sight of the pastry counter got Mr. Weinstein in a huff. ''Now explain this if you will,'' he said. ''What is a 'Japanese style cheesecake?' '' It didn't look half bad, nor did the napoleon nearby. ''I haven't had the heart to try it,'' he said.

Now he was on a roll. He needed more coffee, and we were aiming for Kingly Bakery, across Eighth Avenue. We nibbled on a sweet bun filled with chewy winter melon while Mr. Weinstein got on the subject of Chinese home cooks.

''They don't bake and they don't roast,'' he said. ''It consumes too much fuel. I have friends who are second generation and they haven't opened their ovens.'' Chinese home cooking involves quick techniques like stir frying and steaming. You go to a restaurant or a bakery if you want a roasted duck or a baked sweet.

We got into Mr. Weinstein's car and pressed our way through the afternoon traffic to Manhattan, where Mr. Weinstein had his first Chinatown experience in 1963. ''Back then,'' he said, ''it was literally confined to Mott and Mulberry and a little bit on Elizabeth.'' Now, it sprawls from East Broadway to Allen Street, and from Catherine Street to South Street.

We started down Mott Street. Left and right were vendors selling knockoff purses, beaded bracelets and glass rings. ''They're going to change this to Tchotchke Street someday,'' Mr. Weinstein said.

Then he began sifting through the street's offerings. We stopped at a street vendor with a griddle covered with turnip cakes and a steel soup pot, outside Fong Inn Too, a noodle and bean curd store. ''Ah,'' said Mr. Weinstein. ''Soft bean curd.'' The vendor scooped some into a cup and poured on a syrup that broke the curd into layers. It was like a delicate pudding, and yogurt, too, but warm. The syrup, a mixture of sugar, molasses and water, broke the monotony.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Then we entered the store, a yeasty-smelling little workshop. A scale dangled from the ceiling, and a rotary phone hung on the wall. Mr. Weinstein, who has shopped here since 1968, buys his ho fun noodles here, he said, because it is one of the few stores that still use all rice flour, which they grind themselves. It makes a much smoother, softer noodle. They also make the turnip cakes out on the griddle, as well as tofu and egg noodles. Kevin Chan, the manager, fed us each a sticky, yeasty sliver of fermented rice cake and waved us goodbye.

On Bayard Street, we breezed through Thai & Indonesia Grocery, a closet-size store crammed with every kind of paste imaginable, then pushed our way through the crowded sidewalks to New Beef King, a store specializing in beef jerky. The flat rectangles of beef are displayed neatly on trays like dainty petits fours. There is fruit-flavored beef scented with pineapple, banana, lemon and vanilla, spicy beef and oyster-flavored beef.

Around the corner on Mulberry Street, we stopped at Sui Cheong Meat Market, a butcher shop with a number of fans, including Mr. Schoenfeld, the restaurant consultant, and Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, a cookbook author. ''There's a very high level of expertise,'' Mr. Schoenfeld said. ''Here we are with our big band saws, and they're separating one muscle from the next.''

Mr. Weinstein showed me around as if it were a tour of his house. ''There's every organ of the pig,'' he said. And there was. We passed a row of silky, a black skinned chicken used for making soups, ducks, quail and partridge. ''Then all your feet,'' he said.

We skipped the feet this time, though, and went on to lunch at New Green Bo, a Shanghai-style restaurant with homey food and, according to some Chinese food connoisseurs, the best fried dumplings in the city. We were tasting our way through kau fu (spongy wheat gluten with shiitake mushrooms), mock duck (puff pastry-like layers of bean curd skin wrapped around mushrooms) and shredded pork and tart preserved cabbage with lozenge shaped rice cakes. All, Mr. Weinstein said, were well-executed, typical Shanghai dishes, characterized by both sweet and salty flavors.

Mr. Weinstein stared at a kitchen worker across the room who was holding a blade bone in his hands and chewing on it as if it were a sparerib. ''That's what I've been after,'' he said. ''See what they're eating? Knuckle bones, a big plate of rice and vegetables. That's real home cooking.''

Main Street in Flushing is large and wide, and though it bears the signs of a Chinatown, its real pulse is on the side streets to the east and the west. One block in particular -- 40th Road between Prince and Main Streets -- is a model of diversity. On it you can find Cantonese, dim sum, Shanghai, Japanese, Taiwanese, Chiew Chow (a simpler regional cuisine with influences from Cambodia, Vietnam and Canton) and Malaysian restaurants, a large supermarket and an Italian and Spanish barber shop. On Main Street, chains like the Wiz and McDonald's interrupt the flow.

It's a fairly remarkable change, considering that the first Cantonese restaurant showed up in this neighborhood just over a decade ago. You had to know about it, Mr. Schoenfeld said. To get into it, you had to take an elevator to the basement of a bank.

Now, though its markets are not as sophisticated as those in Manhattan and Brooklyn, Flushing has perhaps the best selection of Taiwanese and Chiew Chow restaurants.

We ambled on to Ten Ren's Tea Time, a Taiwanese tea shop with locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn, where we indulged in trendy tapioca drinks. The back of the store is like a museum, with aluminum urns filled with teas as expensive as $140 a pound. At the front is a counter managed by two young men, simmering marble-size tapioca pearls in a stock pot and mixing drinks with a cocktail shaker. I ordered a kumquat lemon iced tea with a fat yellow straw for sucking up the tapioca.

As our tour was winding down, Mr. Weinstein spotted something new -- a couple making tiny round batter cakes with fillings -- and began asking questions. Soon we were tasting one filled with candied melon and peanut, another with red bean. As a cake was firming up in one of the circular molds on the griddle, he asked, ''How do you get it out?'' Smiling, the woman said, ''You take it.''

Mr. Weinstein laughed. It's the kind of vague response he has become accustomed to after more than 35 years of asking and tasting his way through New York's Chinatowns. None of it seems to have worn down his curiosity. And this whirlwind had only begun to spark mine.

Tapioca Tea

And Moon Cakes

Here are some restaurants and shops on Norman Weinstein's tour of New York's Chinatowns.